


There’s No Race To Be Run

by Meduseld



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Teen Titans - All Media Types
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Friendship, Illnesses, It wasn't intentional but you can very much read Wally/Roy into this, M/M, Magic, Past Relationship(s), Superheroes, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-23 19:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19157569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meduseld/pseuds/Meduseld
Summary: Magic loves feeding on pain, Dick is starting to find.





	There’s No Race To Be Run

**Author's Note:**

> For the DC Bingo prompt "Birdflash". Full disclosure, I haven't actually seen the Titans tv show yet so this is only loosely set in that continuity.

“Um” Rachel says and bites her lip, which is never a good sign.

Beside Dick, both Kory and Gar go tense and if the world wasn’t literally already ending that would be enough to terrify him. But it’s not like Dick ever thought this would be easy.

“So, there’s this spell” she says, fiddling with her sleeves now and refusing meet anybody’s eyes. Suddenly she’s not their arcane, mystic, wise-beyond-her-years expert on all things eldritch. Just a nervous looking girl, who looks like she’s trying to figure out the right words to get to borrow the car.

Only in this case, it’s more like trying to get them to agree to the sort of witchcraft that will let them kill the sort of thing that sits above gods in the food chain.

“Alright” Kory says, steady as ever, “and what does it need?” Dick can hear it in her voice, how she’s calculating the best way to get a pulsing liver, a fresh skull, a still beating heart.

But that wouldn’t really be an offering, not a source of any true power, not in how he’s starting to understand it.

He’s glimpsed things in the books Rachel reads, trying to be there for her even though he’s incredibly out of his depth, feeling like a rubber duck adrift on the ocean. One that’s risking having his brain devoured by ancient magicks. Still, even admitting that, he knows more now than he did when this started.

Real magic requires real sacrifice. More likely, one of them is going to be reaching into their own chest instead.

“It’s okay! You can tell us”, Gar says, trying for encouraging and landing on queasy, instead. Of all of them, he’s had the worst time wrapping his head around witchcraft. For all his time with the strangeness of the Doom Patrol, there was a traceable cause for most of it, no matter how weird it was. He has a hard time taking things on faith.

Rachel shuffles her feet, stares at her Sharpie covered high tops, tongue tied again. Gar has that effect on her.

He can feel Kory’s eyes on him, wanting him to say something, but he won’t. Dick is just waiting her out. He hates to say it but Bruce had at least some aspects of child rearing down. Some days it’s all he can do not to call him for help, which is almost as mind boggling as the eldritch abomination from a dimension beyond their own on its way to eat them out of existence.

Rachel takes a breath and looks Dick square in the eye. For a moment he’s so proud of her it hurts.

“Who did you lose your virginity to?” she asks and he chokes on his own tongue instead.

Whatever noise he makes it sends her into an apologetic flurry of “I’m sorry, it’s so weird I _know_ , but we need her blood willingly given so that you can be invulnerable to Lexur'iga-serr'roth and it’s not like Kory even _knows_ about hers, uh sorry, and Gar hasn’t-”

“Hey!” Gar cuts in, flushed, and while there’s a part of Dick that wants to know how that even came up and how to nip it in the bud immediately he can’t.

There’s no way to focus on any of them, or even the implications of the spell itself, because his mind is lost in the sudden sense memory of _strong fingers skimming up his sides, his whole body saying yes, yes and those lips at his ear saying baby, baby_ -

“I don’t talk to him anymore” he says, without thinking because he needs those memories to go away, thanks, and for the second time in this train wreck conversation the room freezes.

“Wait so” Gar says just as Rachel says “What” just as Kory says “Dick” in her very best I-am-kind-of-an-officer-of-the-law-so-you-can-totally-trust-me voice and it clicks.

It was half of Dick’s adolescence after all, sleazy tabloid innuendo and late night hack jokes and he hates it, still.

“No, _no_ , not that. Never _that_. It- I. He’s only two years older than me, we were friends. We just don’t talk anymore” and it’s not a lie just an incomplete summary of what happened with Wally-and-Dick.

It’s possible that Wally himself would disagree with that assessment but the fact that he’s not there to do it is probably part of the root of the issue anyway.

“Okay” Rachel says into the new, sudden silence. Dick had barely noticed the quiet, still hearing Wally’s voice in his ear, sweet and soft and dirty and loving all at once. He hadn’t realized he’d missed it.

“The willingly part is, uh, pretty key though” she says and Kory snorts beside him.

Not easy after all.

 

*

 

The bar is the right kind of dingy, just enough scruff and red neon to make it interesting to bikers but not too dangerous for newly 21 years old college kids with cash to burn.

ARSENAL it says outside and Dick’s heart aches. Roy had always said that’s what he’d name it.

Maybe he’s not the best choice for this, he was always closer to Wally than to Dick and Roy had been one of the angriest, back then, when Dick chose to walk away and have a life closer to normal.

But they had spent more time together in their civvies than the others because of Oliver’s public connection to Bruce and they understood each other, usually. And anyway Dick hears he’s retired now, with a daughter to take care of, and he’s hoping he’s softened over the years.

Dick could have skipped the bar entirely, used his badge and the systems he has access to, both officially and unofficially, to find Wally’s current address and workplace and probably have a glance into his marital status while he’s at it.

But the idea is uncomfortably invasive, the sort of thing Bruce would do. Has done.

So Dick finds the bar, which is on Yelp, already. The score’s not bad.

He scopes it out early, enough to be sure Roy is probably inside and setting up, door unlocked, but no real customers inside.

It still takes him a few minutes to unclench his hands and walk inside. He’s been on raids against narco compounds less terrifying than this.

The thing that finally gets him to move his feet is the ghost chorus of _Wally’s hands flat on Dick’s stomach, the soft edge of his tongue, the salt of his skin on Dick’s teeth, the downy hair of his thighs so strong from running that-_ that hasn’t let Dick sleep since Rachel started this whole mess.

Or maybe it’s the memory of Wally’s face closing down when Dick left, him and for good.

That Wally won’t leave him now, erased from his life except for the corner that he haunts inside Dick’s head. It’s what he’s thinking of when he shoulders open the door.

Inside the bar the light is dim, and Roy’s head, hair grown longer than a bow had ever allowed, is bent over the bar, a towel over his shoulder. For a second Dick’s so homesick he could cry.

Then Roy sees him, trained instincts still sharp.

There’s no hesitation, no “help you?” no delayed recognition. There wouldn’t be.

Instead he says “Get the fuck out”. Which isn’t unexpected, exactly, but it stings more than he thought.

“Please just let me-” “I’m serious, right the fuck now” Roy says and he doesn’t even sound angry, which is the bizarre part.

He’s just staring unblinking, breathing tight, more like Dick’s a boogeyman than a childhood former friend. It’s enough to get under Dick’s skin, get him to do something frankly stupid. Jason would be proud.

He doesn’t leave. He heads right to the bar instead and slips onto a stool like he owns it. “Roy, I need you to listen-” “And I need you to get out” he says, grabbing at Dick’s collar.

It’s not overtly threatening, not really, not the way Roy could make it. He’s just proving his point, letting Dick know just how serious he is.

The part of Dick that was raised by Alfred Pennyworth says he should walk away, considering just how desperate Roy’s starting to look, leave a card or something and try again later. The part raised by Bruce Wayne says _fuck that_.

He tenses up, letting Roy know that he’s going to have to throw him out or die trying and Roy’s hands get tighter, message received. Adrenaline thrums happily through his veins, itching for the fight, wanting to face off with someone who actually knows what he’s doing for once.

There’s a savage sort of glee in Roy’s face that says he feels the same way. He can feel the lift in his gut, like jumping off a trapeze, and he tilts, Roy meeting him in kind when the back door opens, slapping them both in the face with light.

They freeze like schoolboys caught with a dirty magazine.

“Fuck” Roy mutters, face so close Dick can actually, if barely, hear it. He doesn’t sound scared.

He sounds heartbroken.

It’s Wally in the doorway, of course, because nothing in Dick’s life has ever been easy.

Wally looks good. No, Wally looks great. Taller than Dick, but then again he always was.

It’s the way he’s finished growing into his face, his body. He was always too lean as a kid, greyhound sleek, no extra ounces. He’s filled out now, invitingly solid.

His face is still open, freckled, but he’s cut his hair, taking him from boyish but almost handsome to just boyishly handsome. It’s not quite high and tight but not the long, floppy waves he kept pushing out of his eyes when Dick knew him.

He looks like a poster boy for Midwestern Wholesomeness, so much like Barry that you would think they were blood kin. Just like that, Dick is catapulted back to being a teen with a crush on his best friend, his steady smiles, his quick hands.

Wally’s not smiling now, frowning at Dick, half out of his stool with Roy’s hands still loosely on his collar.

Then he shakes his head minutely, like a dog shaking off water, eyes sliding shut for half a moment and opening again without the furrow in his brow.

“Sorry I’m late –he says directly to Roy, like Dick isn’t even _there_ – we had a tiny, uh, bloodsplosion at work?” It’s a shock to hear his voice hasn’t changed much, still on the high side, still prone to ending every statement like a question.

“Hey buddy” Roy says, like he’s trying to talk down a methed up gangbanger with a knife, “You okay?”

Wally’s face pinches up for a second, like he’s deciding if he’s going to lie. He sighs.

“You mean the –he brings the furrow back, wiggling his fingers at eye level, and looks back at Dick for only a second– yeah, these new meds are making me hallucinate, but it’s fine. They go away?” he says.

Roy gets just a little more tense as Dick heart starts to race with something other than adrenaline. Speedsters don't get sick, not as far as he knows. Not with anything that sounds that serious.

“Walls. What sorts of things are you seeing?” Roy asks, gentle like he knows the answer, and Wally’s eyes go wide.

“So that _is_ Dick?” he says and before Roy can get something out, Wally does something weird, even by his standards.

He plants his feet wide and grasps a dramatic hand over his chest, eyes rolling back.

It’s a comically bad imitation of a Hollywood heart attack and Dick’s about to say something, even if it’s just what the fuck.

Roy on the other hand, jumps like he’s been scalded, making an inarticulate noise. Dick’s hands, forgotten in his collar, keep him from vaulting over the bar.

“Oh come on!” Wally says with a cackle, righting himself, “If I can’t joke about dying, what can I joke about?”

Roy grumbles about how it’s not fucking funny but Dick can barely hear him over the ringing in his ears. “Dying? You’re...” he can hear himself say. Or shout, probably.

“Seriously?” Wally says just as Roy says “You didn’t tell him?”

Wally rolls his eyes. “No, Roy, I didn’t tell my ex-boyfriend that I haven’t talked to in years that my days are numbered, why would I?” he says and Dick makes a wounded little noise he has no right to, he knows.

“Then why is he here?” Roy says like Dick left the room or something, and it jumps out of his chest: a sharp “Roy!” like he’s still their team leader. “ _Dick_ ” Roy says back coolly. “Rocky” Wally says with a smile.

It’s like they’re eighteen years old again.

“Would you please just tell me what’s going on?” he says, and he sounds like he’s bleeding. Wally and Roy share a guilty look, so familiar it’s just another knife to the gut.

“If you’re not here because…” Roy trails off and that’s when Dick remembers why is here, after all. _The mission comes first_ , Batman’s voice rumbles in his ear and he can see in Wally’s eyes that he heard it too.

“Well if you need us to save the world, your luck’s finally done for. Roy’s retired and I’m. Well. I can’t run, anymore” Wally says, looking sicker with every word.

“No, _yes_. I mean” Dick says, trying to get a handle on this, feeling suddenly exhausted. He doesn’t want to be here.

He wants to go home.

He wants to hold Wally.

But not this too adult, too resigned version. He wants _his_ Wally, soft and adolescent, always smelling of candy, soda pop, sugar, always laughing, always with hair artfully blown by Mach 10 winds.

Somehow, in all these years, it never occurred to Dick that that Wally was gone. And Dick doesn’t have the time to mourn him, especially since it looks like soon he’ll be mourning the Wally that is now.

“Yeah, okay, you’re gonna need a fucking drink” Roy says, sighing at the way Dick and Wally have just been staring at each other for what feels like a long time.

“Thank you” Dick says because he has Pennyworth manners and he can’t mean Wally, anyway.

Dick hopes not, anyway. Wally would never drink, for about a million reasons between his powers and his father. If he does, he might just finish losing it.

It’s not what happens. Roy reaches behind the bar for a water bottle for Wally and a shot for Dick.

Not top shelf stuff, but not the absolute bottom, either. He deserves it, probably.

It doesn’t really matter, anyway. He downs it too quickly for the burn to really hurt.

“Now get out of my face, I need to set up and you fuckers have taken enough of my time already” Roy says with no heat, but he still gets the message. _You’re not gonna get the comfort of doing this wasted_ and _I’m still watching you_ all in one.

When he gets up, his legs feel like they’re full of water, the way ordinary people say they feel when they’re too high up. Dick’s never really felt it before.

He half stumbles half falls into the seat in front of Wally in some lonely back booth, the one Roy must get to last in his routine.

Wally and Roy must know these things about each other and it stings all over again, the way he’s no longer one of them, no longer someone that belongs here.

“It’s my heart” Wally says without preamble, tapping his knuckles on his sternum. “No jokes, please” he adds, trying for funny and landing on brutally honest. In the dim light, his eyes look damp.

“Wally, why didn’t you tell me, I might not be talking to my fath- _Bruce_ right now but-” Dick rambles until Wally cuts him off with a bitter laugh. “Oh _gee_ , why didn’t _I_ think of the zillionaire with a sideline in healthcare?”

Dick just stares at him because yeah, Wally didn’t need him for that. And he can’t even fault Bruce for not telling him either, not with his odd understanding of privacy and the way things have been, between them, since Dick decided to hang up the cape.

Funny, he’s never thought about how leaving his past behind him would hurt him in this way too, the spaces he longer fits in, the misplaced entitlement sitting on his chest like a stone.

Across from him, Wally sighs, like he regrets snapping. “It’s not really…" he stops, swallows, suddenly looking old. Worn.

"The speedforce is calling me home” he says finally, quietly, looking somewhere over Dick’s shoulder, eyes glassy and unfocused.

He’d said almost the exact same words to Dick once, the same look in his eye, when Barry had run into the great wide nothing.

None of the others speedsters had panicked, or tried to go after him. It had been terrifying, really, how their faces had changed all at once, the way they all _knew_.

Max Mercury is gone too, he’s heard. Jessie Quick dropped off his radar. And it's been a long time since Dick kept up with the community. He doesn’t even know if it still exists.

He wants to reach out for Wally’s hands. He wants to tell him that he loves him, which he does, in his way, but he knows it won’t help.

Because he knows that right now it would be worst sort of insult, in the face of Wally’s trust, his faith that Dick has remembered it. All of it. Even the things Wally never said.

His eyes track the way Wally swallows, that pale freckled throat working, the taste of the skin an intense memory on Dick’s tongue. It’s like he can’t stop, now that he’s started.

“The pills help. They keep me _here_ , for the most part, keep me from shifting into overdrive. Mostly” he's saying to the air, but Dick knows that Wally knows he’s listening. Hanging on every word.

He wishes he didn’t understand what he means, wishes he hadn’t spent countless nights curled on his pale chest listening to him explain what made him run, the way it sometimes felt like the speed was moving him and not the other way around.

“But one day…” “It’ll pull a fast one on you” Dick says, because Wally had finally looked at him, like a drowning man that didn’t want rescue but comfort before the last of the water filled his lungs to the brim. “Pretty much” he says, with a grim little grin.

The speedforce called them all home, eventually, Wally had told him in the dark. At the time it had seemed a distant fairytale, as real to Dick as Heaven or Nirvana or The Happy Hunting Grounds, a story to sing him to sleep with Wally's pulse thudding against his cheek. And now it's a time bomb in his chest.

"I'm sorry" he says, trying to put all the feelings, too heavy in his mouth, in the words.

"Everybody's sorry man" Wally answers cheerfully, something Hal used to say, he’s pretty sure.

And Dick has to swallow his tongue, choke down on the feeling, the utter gratitude at his forgiveness.

"Okay" Dick says, staring at the scarred wood of the booth's shitty tabletop as he catches his breath. "Wanna help me save the world anyway?" he says, trying to smile.

Wally smiles bright enough for an accident at a nuclear power plant. "Duh. Thought you'd never ask"

 

*

 

The last reading room in the building is small but comfortable, warmly paneled in wood and full of leather bound books, beautiful in spite of the ugly things they contain.

Rachel's one of the few people allowed free reign over the secret collection of Gotham's Public Library, the one full of arcane texts that'll melt your face off if you're careful and worse if you're not.

Dick had set the meeting there, partly because it's a place of power that will help the spell, picked from the list Rachel helpfully texted him, and partly because it will keep this contained.

He doesn't need Gar gawking at Wally or Kory making jokes about redheads. The fact that he spent many teenaged afternoons making out with Wally in the stacks doesn't have anything to do with it, is what he'll say if Wally brings it up.

He does and he doesn't.

"Oh man" he says, the Midwest suddenly heavy in his voice despite all the years he's spent in California. It must be the nostalgia.

"Do you remember how we used to play hide and seek in here? With Roy and Donna and everybody?" Wally says, half smiling.

Everybody. Like there was anyone else. Like they had tons of friends, like they were normal kids messing around, like they were anything other than what they were.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he hears himself say, hurt and rusty from how he’s been holding it in the whole way there, flying across the country with someone who used to run that distance in less than an eye blink. This familiar stranger he feels half in love with.

Wally bites his lip, an old tell, because he’s considering lying. He looks very pale under his freckles now.

“Because you would have come. And you would have told me you loved me and then you’d…” And before he can answer, before he can think of anything to say, Wally finishes. “I wouldn’t be strong enough. To say no. And I can’t really live with being that much of an asshole, okay?”

Dick wants to deny it. He can’t. All he can do is reach between them and squeeze Wally’s hand.

After a moment, he squeezes back.

He lets go right before Dick opens the door to the hidden reading room, where Rachel is curled up on a chair. Something in Dick’s heart clenches at that, how she looks like she should be in a suburban bedroom somewhere, teen mag opened on top of a textbook, the walls covered in posters of teenyboppers.

She looks up immediately when she hears them and blurts “Ohmigod you’re dying!” looks horrified and adds “that sucks, I’m so sorry!” and claps her hands over her mouth.

“Yeah” Wally says “it _does_ suck” and laughs like it’s a relief. Maybe it is.

Just as Dick opens his mouth, the idea blazing to life, she ends it. “I can’t- I don’t think- there’s nothing I can do” she says, looking stricken.

“That’s okay. I’ve had time to get used it” Wally answers, stretching out his hand. “I’m Wally by the way”.

She shakes, dwarfed by him, skin looking grey. Dick still hasn’t adjusted to the fact that Wally’s a man’s size now, and still enough to tan a little, instead of turning fish belly white because he ran too quickly to let the sun touch him.

“Right, so, Dick told you what we have to do?” Rachel asks and Wally nods, the way he used to be when they were on missions.

“I can’t, um, heal your after either, just so you know” she says, still sounding so apologetic. “I know. Besides, it’s far from the first time Dick’s stitched me up” he says with a smile, with a quick, comradely punch to his shoulder.

That, at least, is true.

Rachel pulls out the bowl, lined with agonized faces, and the wood and the knife. Her special knife.

She whispers over them for a moment, in a tongue not meant for mankind. Dick tries to mumble reassurances at Wally.

“This is gonna hurt” she says, in English again, voice steadier now that’s she’s the one running the show.

“I know that too” Wally says, steady. No. Eager. Like he’s missed this.

Dick doesn’t say anything. There’s no point.

Rachel pulls Wally’s arm forward, baring his wrist over the bowl. They nod at each other.

Then the knife digs in and the blood drips down.

**Author's Note:**

> And then idk, Dick wins a boon from the Elder Gods that fixes Wally and everyone was happy forever. Since you know how I do: the title is from _[No Plan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXq_J29V5Io)_ by Hozier which is just such a perfect fit;  
> I got Lexur'iga-serr'roth [from Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos_deities#Table_of_Great_Old_Ones) so he might not actually be legit but the descriptor " _He Who Devours All in the Dark_ : A photophobic bat-winged monstrosity, with both a thousand-eyed misshapen head and huge maws" was too perfect to pass up;  
> in this fic Wally is played by the lovely [Spencer Treat Clark](https://www.instagram.com/streatclark/) and Roy is played by [Jake Weary](https://stilinski-ortiz-dolan.tumblr.com/post/183377810496) mainly on the strength of their chemistry on _[Animal Kingdom](https://stilinski-ortiz-dolan.tumblr.com/post/184975183811)_[ (he even owns a bar!)](https://stilinski-ortiz-dolan.tumblr.com/post/184975183811);  
> . ETA: [this perfect gifset of what Spencer as Wally](https://stilinski-ortiz-dolan.tumblr.com/post/188413389021) would be like in this fic.  
> Wally’s condition is cribbed from [the similar comics situation he had](https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Flash_\(Wally_West\))(the bloodsplosion is because he's a forensic scientist) and [the heartbreaking letter](https://youdontknowdick.tumblr.com/post/165346018914/wallys-letter-to-dick) he wrote Dick about it;  
> and Wally is also a dork that references _[The Rocky Horror Picture Show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjOLP8dQ78w)_.


End file.
